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You’re in what you thought would be your dream house — until it wasn’t.
The living room ceiling has been ripped out after sewage water backed up and flooded the upstairs bathroom. With the drywall gone, you can spot loose nails and concerning gaps between the floor joists. Rainwater seeps through the cracks around the front door.
Insects crawl through the window frames — even though the windows were reinstalled because they weren’t installed properly in the first place. And most of your bathrooms are unusable, awaiting repairs the builder promised more than a year ago.
It feels like a nightmare — but it’s reality, according to Danielle Antonucci, who invited a Hunterbrook Media reporter to the home she and her husband bought just four years ago in Sarasota, Florida, built by the nation’s largest homebuilder, D.R. Horton ($DHI). In an email provided to Hunterbrook, Antonucci desperately pleaded with D.R. Horton to address the numerous defects rendering their home nearly uninhabitable: “I keep getting the response that this matter has been escalated to the Sarasota office,” she wrote. “It has been 21 months!”
As someone who recently built a new home (not with DR Horton because they are complete trash), the solution to this issue rests in the inspection process.
Especially with a builder well-known for shoddy workmanship, you have to have every single phase of the house inspected and you need to be onsite regularly to point out things to the builder. Also, while builders are giving such incredible incentives on spec homes with like 4.5% rates, sometimes, it isn’t worthwhile in the end because you miss out on the option of having the house inspected at every point.
DR Horton has a neighborhood a few streets from mine and I could have had a bigger home for possibly cheaper, but I refused to use them. I had an inspection at just pre-drywall and pre-close, but a DR Horton home requires inspections at the initial dig, pre-foundation pouring, post-pouring, framing, electrical and plumbing, pre-insulation, post-drywall, flooring installation, pre-close, and then an 11-month inspection, too. And, if the builder says things like “the inspector can’t go onto the roof” or “we don’t have to fix anything that the inspector finds” walk. Regardless of the incentives, the headache is not worth the offer.
I didn’t build a home but did buy a house that was recent construction. We had an inspector go over the place and he was shocked…
Evidently they actually did a respectable job building the house, evidently the best foundation and attic he had ever seen. He found a couple of things due to settling and some minor wear, but everything was just done right.